Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Under "Planetary and Astral Influences" she stumbled across (appropriately) acrostics formed with stones. Acrostics were linked concepts whose first letters spelled out a meaning.

  Thus,

  Feldspar Amethyst Idocrase (Huh?) Topaz Heliotrope

  . . . spelled out F-AT-T-H with their first letters. Eighteenth-century French and English women would wear rings, bracelets and brooches set with these gems in order to give the secret message. However, change one gem and you had quite a different saying. Temple's larcenous mind invented a new quintet:

  Topaz

  Heliotrope

  Idocrase

  Emerald

  Feldspar

  Thief. Or a slightly twisted Feith.

  Hope looked a little harder to come by than Faith. She smiled at the obscure or antique-named gems listed:

  Hematite Olivine Pyrope Essonite

  Luckily, more common alternate gems were given for each motto: Hyacinth Opal Pearl Emerald

  Hyacinth was a gemstone? Be still her beating .. .

  Hyacinth

  Emerald

  Amethyst

  Ruby

  Topaz!

  . . . HEART!

  Max looked up from the massive tome table topping his knees. "Something you ate?"

  "Heartburn. You're right. Did you know there was a gemstone called hyacinth?"

  "Never in a million years."

  Temple was fumbling through the index for citations on the gem called "hyacinth."

  Max watched her with amusement. "You'll excuse me if I rather doubt that Effinger was carrying the name of a rare precious stone in his pocket."

  But Temple was immersed in the long description of jewels in the High Priest's breastplate from the book of Exodus.

  There it was, hyacinthus, listed among the twelve foundation stones of the New Jerusalem in Revelations as well as on the High Priest's ritual body armor. Granted, various translations from the Hebrew, Greek and Latin through the centuries varied on just what the stones were: sapphire seemed a popular substitute for the more obscure hyacinth or its apparent twin, jacinth.

  And lists of birthstones for the various months included hyacinth as a second choice on more than one month.

  And in the Sanskrit of India, the hyacinth was a jewel dedicated to a mysterious "dragon,"

  the cause of the periodic eclipses of sun and moon. As such--the embodiment of the evil genius of a great, unseen power--it was a potent talisman against misfortune.

  Temple devoured these arcane info-bits and finally spat them out undigested to Max.

  "Fascinating," he said in his best Mr. Spock manner. "But I just can't see any of this falderal having anything to do with that animated piece of pond scum called Cliff Effinger."

  "No, I can't either. Yet. I'm just happy to find out that the word has some other history than as the name of a boring and innocuous flower."

  Max had neglected to drop his eyes to the book he was studying. Instead he was staring into the distance as if much enamored of it.

  "On the other hand," he murmured.

  Then he was up, so smooth and fast that the abandoned book eased itself shut with a whisper of slick pages.

  "What?" Temple sprang up like a raspberry-topped Pop-Tart.

  "On the other hand," Max repeated in a more energetic tone, taking hers, "maybe that's where I ran across the word on Gan-dolph's files. Not in the general folders, but in the directory he labeled " 'Shan.' "

  "Na-na?"

  He dragged her back to the computer room, scooted a wheeled steno chair under her, then sat down in the computer chair to play the keyboard like piano.

  "I didn't think to check the files involving that magician league hocus-pocus."

  Temple refrained from offering Matt's definition of the origin of the phrase "hocus-pocus"

  from the Latin of the Roman Catholic mass: body and blood.

  Some info-bits were unwelcome, even in an information age.

  "Hmmph." Max sounded grouchy.

  "Couldn't and it?"

  "Oh, it's here all right. But as vaguely mentioned as the mysterious 'Synth.' "

  "What's really bothering you?"

  "Heartburn?" he asked wryly. "Meatloaf? Really, Temple."

  She shrugged.

  Max shook his head, his dark hair as sleek and glossy as Midnight Louie's--Max's long, back-gathered hair serving as the tail to finish off the comparison.

  Won't you come home, Midnight Louie? Temple sang inside her head. She already did the cooking, such as it was, and she paid the rent.

  "I don't like it." Max pushed back, making the chair squeak for mercy. "What does this mumbo jumbo of Gandolph's have to do with what lowlife Cliff Effinger was carrying around in a note in his pocket?"

  "I was also mentioned in that note, somehow."

  "How do you know?"

  "I forgot to mention it. Molina paid me a surprise interrogation today. Unfortunately, Electra thought she was there to follow up on Effinger's assault on me, so Molina now knows that I have plenty of motive to wish him ill."

  "And me more motive."

  "And Matt even more motive than you."

  "All right! We're all motivated to death! What about the note mentioning you?"

  "She wouldn't say exactly how I was mentioned, but admitted to 'hyacinth.' And she did tell me how Effinger died."

  "Forgot to mention that too?"

  "I was coming to see you."

  "Awwwww. Couldn't think of anything else, poor baby. So . . . how did he die?"

  "Via barge. Only he was 'affixed' to the boat and sank with it during the programmed descent."

  " Affixed?' That was Molina's word for it?"

  Temple nodded glumly. "Would I forget a weird description like that? Plus, Louie and his little friend from the Crystal Phoenix were at the scene of the crime."

  "Louie? And . . . who?"

  "This black female cat that showed up at the Phoenix after he moved on. I didn't think they got along."

  "They're both cats; of course they get along. But why at the Oasis, on the very scene of Effinger's dramatic demise?"

  "I don't know. Molina seemed a little spooked by it, though."

  "Molina? Spooked?" Max snorted.

  "I know it's hard to believe. Maybe she has personal pressures. Or maybe she's tired of Louie and me showing up in every case she supervises. . . and you never showing up at all."

  Max's smile was surprisingly mellow. "Not always 'never.' I want to see the autopsy report. I can try breaking into the computers for it, or I can have some real fun and ask Molina for it."

  "Max, no! You can't! If she got a hold of you, she'd never let you go."

  "We could negotiate."

  "How?"

  "By phone. By computer."

  "Those are traceable."

  "For a while."

  "You like darting into the lion's mouth."

  "I'm used to it."

  "I'm not."

  "Oh yes, you are. And speaking of that, when are you going to tell Devine?"

  Temple squirmed until her unstable chair tilted.

  "I can understand you didn't want to ruin his grand night of reporting the triumph of nailing Effinger," Max went on. "Hey, I'm glad he did it. Otherwise, I would have had to. More power to him. He's got a G-man cereal-box badge in my book. So he's a big boy now. He deserves to know, Temple."

  Yes, but. She couldn't tell Max about Matt's newest secret: Kitty's bizarre and disturbing attack. Temple sincerely wished she could. Kitty was a wild card. Max would understand wild cards as no one else would.

  They were an eternally stymied trio right out of Jean Paul Sartre's play about Hell, No Exit.

  Only instead of being held in stasis by conflicting sexual preferences, they each held different pieces of a jigsaw puzzle long in the making. And the game board upon which the disparate parts were coming together was called "Effinger." If only they would compare enigmas. Or the two men would allow her to move between them with
out each demanding her utter confidence and loyalty.

  But no. Each tolerated the other's existence, at a distance, only so far. And the battleground became, not Effinger, their common enemy, but Temple, their common friend. And in one case, lover. Past. Present.

  "When the time's right," she finally said.

  Max said no more. The time was right for him now.

  *****************

  They adjourned to the kitchen for a final glass of wine.

  Hyacinth, they agreed, was presenting as much of a stalemate as the issue of Matt.

  "Maybe it was meant to be a distraction," Max suggested. "Maybe Effinger wanted to pick out a roll of toilet paper with that brand name. I think it's a dead end."

  "It was for Effinger," Temple said.

  Max was determined to pursue what he called "official sources" on Effinger's death, but they also were in accord that Effinger's passing should not go unnoted.

  They plotted his funeral. Temple agreed to walk Matt through it, and Max made no unseemly comments about their continuing partnership in death. Max needed to stay out of plain sight; as much as Max wanted Matt out of Temple's life, he needed him.

  Stalemate.

  Max leaned across the kitchen table to jiggle Temple's wrist.

  "You're looking tired."

  "Sweet-talker."

  "Let's go to bed. No?"

  "Why can't this house have one regular bedroom?"

  "You don't like the opium bed?"

  "Oh, it's great for lounging around in when you're feeling decadent. Fine for foreplay. But...

  when I was little--no wise cracks; I mean when I was really little, a tiny kid--my doting grandmother got me one of those stupid Colonial beds with a white eyelet canopy. And pink satin ribbon twining through the eyelets.

  "I was only five or six. I hated having to climb up into that bed using a stool, like I was a baby. I hated the pink satin ribbons, and I hated that canopy that hung over me every night like an eyelet spider web. I kept thinking about all the creepy things that might be hiding up there.

  Spiders and bats and snakes, all waiting for me to go to sleep so they could fall down on me."

  "You're afraid of enclosed beds. But the opium bed doesn't have any concealing curtains.

  The frame is pierced."

  "But all those carvings. Those hidden faces in the shadows, watching."

  "Now the bed's a voyeur! Your romantic imagination always takes a Gothic twist. All right.

  We'll sleep in 'my' bedroom, on the futon. Should be good for our backs."

  "Yes, therapeutic."

  But when they got to the room Temple had glimpsed only once, she was struck by its stark opposition to the excesses of the opium bed.

  "Now here I could be agoraphobic instead of claustrophobic! This looks like a monk's cell."

  She eyed the low black-lacquered tables, the huge red ceramic vase sporting one stalk of driftwood, the black-and-white fabric on the futon. "I wish we could live at the Circle Ritz like we used to."

  Max adjusted a panel installed on the wall and low music infiltrated the simple "cell."

  Vangelis, like the dusty CDs in Temple's bedroom.

  "Magicians are addicted to extremes," Max said with a smile. "We love the elaborate for the illusion it offers, but the underlying tricks are all deceptively simple."

  "So the opium bed is the set dressing--"

  "The futon is the basic necessity. I suppose I could be really simple and revert to the floor."

  "Or the cave floor."

  Max shrugged, dimming the lights. "You're hopelessly domestic."

  "Domestically hopeless," she said, laughing. "But I guess it doesn't matter where, or when, or on what. Only with whom."

  "As long as," he added, "there are no hidden spiders, snakes and Chinese bats."

  Temple eyed the room's pristine white ceiling from the starched comfort of the futon a few minutes later. She would never tell Max, but too much blank simplicity overhead turned into an empty movie screen for the horror show of her anxieties and worries.

  Excess or simplicity. Neither distracted her from the ever-present, encroaching Gothic all around, twining toward the unwary like kudzu. Danger and death and things that go bump in the night, like conscience. And secrets.

  Chapter 34

  Siamese Twins

  I am most sorry to leave the backstage scene of the Opium Den and the presence of the lively Hyacinth, but I have a mission to accomplish.

  So I make a lightning run back to the Circle Ritz. This is some trek to undertake in a hurry. If I am not careful, I will be in need of an undertaker, all right. So I try to hitch a few rides, but the Strip does not usually offer the sort of working vehicle that is best for clandestine hitchhiking.

  The delivery vans and panel trucks usually take Highway 15 to avoid the crush and the hordes of tourists on foot crossing every intersection.

  I must admit that I am spotted now and then, and my obvious sense of purpose is duly noted.

  "Look, Craig. That cat looks like he knows where he is going. And what is he carrying in his mouth?"

  "Probably a dead lizard. Or a long tongue. How can he know where he is going? Everyone knows that cats do not think. And I am not too sure about dogs, either."

  Imagine crediting dogs with an evolutionary edge, however slight, over cats! Ridiculous.

  Another sign of the jealous nature and weak-minded stance of those who disdain feline virtues.

  Of course I do look rather silly with the object of my mission flapping from my mouth in the dry desert breeze, but I am singularly short of pockets in this skin-tight catsuit I wear (and the Mystifying Max thinks he invented black velvet Spandex for his act!).

  I do not know if my Miss Temple (and I do consider her my Miss Temple even though she has developed a wandering eye of late) is still pursuing the floral angle on Hyacinth, but I think the feline angle in the angular person of Miss Hyacinth Curare-tips (and probably lips, for all I know) is a far more promising lead. At least it sniffs that way to me, but I may be a bit prejudiced. "Cherchez la femme" strikes me as stellar advice in all cases.

  Do you know that I am also wondering if Miss Temple has perhaps had a bolt backed out in her brain since Mr. Cliff Effinger slapped her silly against a van side? Also, her conversion to contact lenses could account for her strange lack of vision in selecting her male companions lately. She should know from experience that I am always hot on the trail of evil-doing, and am also very cuddly and undemanding--except for my territory, which has been our bed, our bedroom and our suite of rooms all these past months, with visitors allowed at my discretion and with my approval.

  I am not surprised when I get home that the bathroom window is ajar in welcome but the place is as bare as a stripper's bottom at the All-nite, All-nude Bar on Paradise and Flamingo, Las Vegas's least classy junction.

  I sniff for unwanted scents and they are all over the place: Mr. Matt Devine, Mr. Max Kinsella, Lieutenant C. R. Molina ... the only one not present of late in my digs seems to be the late Mr. Elvis Presley. I even dig up the faintest sniff of hyacinth in bloom, which I recognize from sniffing the plant on Miss Shangri-La's dressing table, that Miss Hyacinth of Siam almost knocked to the floor in one of her frequent fits of peke. (That is another snot-nosed breed of dog I cannot stand, the Pekinese, and it is an Asian import to boot.)

  Well, I drop my offering on Miss Temple's coffee table, which lately, according to my expert sniffer, has held only libations of a more bibulous nature. (I believe this bibulous liquid is something found in the Bible, as in admonitions to not get drunk. Liquor is a kick, but I only lap a little up at a time.)

  I certainly hope Miss Temple's contact lenses can spot a clue as big as a brochure. But I have done all a little fellow like me can.

  So I skedaddle and make my arduous way back downtown. Every instinct in my body tells me that the Opium Den is where all the action is in this case, and I do not think this solely because a sinuous lady with sap
phire eyes and ruby-red claws awaits my return with bated breath.

  Chapter 35

  Mum's the Word

  "Maybe this will be therapeutic," Temple suggested to Matt in her living room the next morning.

  "You mean, my literally burying Effinger?"

  She nodded.

  Matt consulted a small notepad he'd brought down from his

  place.

  "I asked my mother about any relatives. She said she didn't know of any." He slapped the notepad against his knee. "Sad, isn't it? To be that isolated. Must have hated his family, for probably the same reasons I hated him. Sound like therapy to you?"

  "Absolutely. So what can we say in the newspaper obituary?"

  "Cliff Effinger. Lowlife around Las Vegas. No survivors, no mourners, no loss."

  "Is 'bitter' therapeutic?"

  "No, but it's fun. You're the press-release writer. Come up with something."

  "Okay. Um." She commandeered the notepad and turned to a clean page. "Cliff Effinger, starting with the name is good. Died January second. Formerly of Chicago."

  "That's good!" Matt encouraged her.

  "Longtime Las Vegas resident."

  He nodded.

  "Ah . . . what can we say he did?"

  "Small business man."

  "Very small. Okay, put that in. And what you suggested. No survivors. Visitation at 1 p.m. at Sam's Funeral Home on Charleston Boulevard. Interment private."

  "Fine. Good. I'm glad Electra knew someone with a funeral home. Now what?"

  "Now we visit the funeral home, buy a suitably modest casket and decide what clothes to put on the corpse and all that fun stuff."

  "I guess I've finally got control of the creep, haven't I? I could even have him burie'd in an Elvis jumpsuit."

  Temple giggled. "Talk about a picture to remember. Just keep laughing. Think of this as theater, not burying someone."